Lisa Dempster works to one very large and important deadline every year as director of the Melbourne Writers Festival: an 11-day festival of more than 380 events, featuring hundreds of authors across numerous venues.
And when it’s all over, she starts again.
“Every year you come in and start with a blank slate,” Dempster tells Women’s Agenda. “We work fifty weeks a year and have two weeks to make it happen. Our audience goals, box office targets, everything happens in those two weeks.”
So it’s a good thing she doesn’t mind the challenge of a significant deadline. It also helps that she prefers to consider the “big picture” aspects of festival organising, rather than the finer details.
Lisa believes it’s her big picture thinking that makes her successful in the role. A former writer, editor and aspiring independent publisher herself, she’s always loved the total experience of literary festivals, at one point attending six or so a year to get her fix of reading, writing, authors and ideas.
The finalist in the 2014 NAB Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards is currently working on her second Melbourne Writers Festival, having delivered a successful and well-received event in August 2013 that saw big names like Tavi Gevinson and London mayor Boris Johnson involved. In the last year she’s also developed a new strategic direction for the festival that includes a major cultural shift to making digital media a priority.
Still she never set out to be an arts manager or festival director, nor did it occur to her that there could be a career path in organising the events she loved to attend so much. At least not until the former director of the Emerging Writers Festival (an annual Melbourne-based event) resigned and told Lisa she should apply for the position.
“I did apply not ever expecting to get it which I think is a common thing for women. I didn’t have direct arts experience, but I did have passion for the sector and experience in organising large events.”
She followed up three years working on the Emerging Writers Festival with a three-month stint in Bali, working on the Ubud Writers’ & Readers’ Festival which offered a taste of festival programming at the international level. In 2012 on her 33rd birthday, she officially took the helm of the major Melbourne event – which was, she says, at least five times larger than anything she’d previously worked on in her career.
With a permanent team of five, Lisa’s team scales up as the August event nears to thirty paid staff and more than 200 volunteers. She credits the success of her team with the fact she hires well, matching her “big picture thinking” with individuals who can manage the details and come together as a team to bring it all together.
She still attends plenty of festivals, although traveling to such events in Sydney, Brisbane, Singapore and Beijing is all part of the direct research required for managing the Melbourne event.
But once a writer herself, specialising in creative non-fiction and travel writing, she says she spends too much time thinking about authors and ideas to put personally put much to paper. “My head’s too crowded with the work of everyone else.”
Lisa Dempster is a finalist in the Emerging Leader in the NFP sector category of the NAB Women’s Agenda Leadership awards. Check back with Women’s Agenda for more on the finalists.